Hyde Park - Broad Walk cycle track changes

OK - Broad Walk is a bit shit to cycle on but it looks like Royal Parks want to make it worse.

Yes, they are planning on interrupting the path at every junction with a weird gravelly bit with no markings. WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

There's a survey you can complete that lets you tell them what BW is like to walk / cycle, but more importantly, tell them what you think of the plans.

Given the cobblers they made of the junctions at both ends of W Carriage Drive, I don't hold out much hope for this.

WHAT COULD WRONG?

Go? :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7trn91xkJ0w

:)

I've never found cycling through there to be too bad. The north and south exits bother me a little but not a great deal.

That gravel doesn't sound great though, The smooth tarmac was one of its appeals as a route :/

The Broadwalk is a very important route for cyclists and is a part of the Central London Cycle Grid. Peak flows along Broad Walk are extremely high even for London standards, with over 1200 cyclists per hour in the morning.

Prior to any works being considered, a monitoring study of the route was undertaken by Atkins in June 2016, to observe cyclists speeds and conflict between users. The study found that more than half of all cyclists travel above the recommended 12mph, considered by The Royal Parks to be the maximum considerate cycling speed limit in its parks (top speed of 32 mph was recorded at 18:58 on a Wednesday). The interaction between those on foot and those on bike led to over 2 near misses each week

Well that settles it. Two near misses a week! Speed bumps and cobbles it is.

Thanks for posting the link.

There is some really bad riding on this stretch.

I'd say the Atkins study is bang on.

Gravel is pretty on trend.

Grammin opportunity...

Clearly a conspiracy with bike manufacturers so people can justify buying a gravel bike for their commute.

Thanks for posting @Howard. Survey filled in. Go through here everyday. It's lovely but the path is only really wide enough for 3 cyclists - encouraging you to speed up to get past slow coaches before someone coming the other way attempts the same. It pretty much makes you go faster than the advised 12mph - especially the impatient types. Much like the new plan the markings aren't great either. It's not that surprising that groups of tourist meander all over path not really acknowledging the white lines mean bikes are about. The gravel does sound fun though!

Saw the signs about this yesterday and wondered what the plans were, assumed it would be an extension of the segregated path on south carriage drive, but clearly not. Looking forward to the alternative of two near misses every pass of park lane as you try and cross 4 lanes of fast moving traffic.

The south carriage drive was TFL designed. This will by the royal parks.

The royal parks are far less on board with the idea of providing decent infrastructure for cyclists.

But...they consulted the 'cycling touring club'.

lulz

Had a chat with the LCC about this - they think RP's design solution is not an improvement to the existing track.

I suspect RP might want commuting traffic out of the park - which is fair enough - and their plan to achieve this is to make 'getting somewhere' cycling in the park as difficult and arduous as possible.

Oh look what just arrived...

To stand any chance of getting a real solution TFL needs to work with RP to either build a proper, segregated track in the park, or put in a proper segregated track out of the park and alongside Park Lane.

Sounds easy when you write it down... :)

There is some really bad riding on this stretch.

Yes. I had a nasty collision traveling north to south, turning off broad walk to cross park lane. Chap on a bike coming south to north very quickly, turned to his right without signaling and decked me.

I was not impressed.

This looks like what has been done on the bike route in the south part of Kensington Gardens. Essentially it's traffic calming for cyclists to put the onus on them to slow down and avoid conflicts, while removing the central white line that seemed to routinely confuse/be ignored by tourists.

One, perhaps predictable, outcome is that cyclists simply leave the path to avoid having their teeth rattled by the granite rumble strips, leading to little muddy patches by the side of the path.

It's not awful, and it may slow some people down southbound. The slight uphill gradient northbound tended to keep speeds down in my experience.

Yes, it's similar. The rumble strips don't work - in the sense that they cause less discomfort the harder you hit them - but people on bikes skirt them because they can.

What they did to SG to KP struck me as waste of time / money. RP seem to think it works and I guess they have the data to back that up.

The same approach applied to MA - HPC Broad Walk may well be awful with 1,200 people on bikes / hr at peak times - it would be interesting to know how the throughput between the two compares.

I think the changes in Kensington Gardens were a bit of a waste of time and money. There never seemed to be significant conflict on that route since most traffic was end-to-end. Hyde Park seems slightly different, Broad Walk was always an area where I routinely encountered clueless tourist pedestrians wandering (often backwards, holding a camera) across the bike lane (in contrast to the South Carriage drive, which has a fence along its south edge, preventing crossing). Since there was no real acknowledgement of the bike lane (as designated by the white line and bike symbols), giving cyclists a sense of ownership of that lane it seemed to add to the potential conflict and stress. Re-signing it to clarify that it's a genuinely shared-use path across its whole width makes more sense to me. I've never understood whay people would expect it to be anything other than a low-speed lane i.e., a pedestrian area to which cyclists are given access.

clueless tourist pedestrians wandering (often backwards, holding a camera) across the bike lane

Here in lies the rub. It's a park. People don't expect to get decked by bikes in a park. They don't to expect to have to read signs, either, to prevent them from being decked by bikes when they blunder in to the 'wrong' bit of the park.

This is why Broad Walk is so shit - there is no physical design to tell people that different bits of the 'walk are for different things.

From the plans - first post - it seems that RP are not adding additional physical differentiation to the cycle lane. They are taking what differentiation there was away. At every junction, the cycle path ends, and the space in between is some weird no-mans land with golden gravel where anything goes, including I assume walking backwards with a camera, anywhere you like, which is totally cool - in a park :)

The proof will be in the eating I guess, and maybe the raised paving will do something. Who knows!

I think the idea is that the whole route is "anything goes" so people will use their natural common sense (ha!) to avoid conflict i.e., it is based on the original principle of shared space: visibly maximise the theoretical risk and people will compensate and work it out amongst themselves. This seems to work ok in Kensington Gardens as long as you don't expect to cycle anywhere fast.

youre getting this everywhere now folks, authorities all over the place are going ' oh its shared space' in the wider parts, relying on good behaviour being the expectation rather than having the bollocks to say, thats for bikes, thats for peds- lets make it clear. Thats Blighty, still not prepared to accept that bikes are transport. Unwavering, predictable, exact machines for making journeys of the same time every time.

The Kensington park rumble strips have worked to be fair.

For a while most people skirted them. Not so easy when grass is churned up muddy af. Most people now as I have observed ride slower and over them.

It's the end of the year, there's money in the coffers and they don't want their budget to be even smaller than it will be next financial year.

OMG a ROW is ERUPTING

speedbumps or rumble strips?!

To be honest, I can see where this is coming from. However, as already stated up there ^.. the way the north and south exits are handled bodes badly for this.